Laura Wright

Displacing the Voice: South African Feminism and JM Coetzee's Female Narrators

In her now famous essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak claims ‘if, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern female is even more deeply in shadow’ (Spivak 1994:83). Spivak’s essay is, of course, required reading for any critic who wants to discuss the intersections of postcolonialism and feminism, and it perhaps stands at the forefront of a movement of feminist differentiation in its placing of the subaltern female subject in a category distinct from her western sisters, just as Alice Walker’s term ‘womanist’ sought to differentiate between white feminist rhetoric and black women’s sociopolitical concerns in the United States in the 1970s. It seems wise, therefore, to foreground any discussion of JM Coetzee’s female narrators as feminist (or anti-feminist) with some brief contextualisation of the postcolonial feminist debate, almost all of which, at least in its codified and canonised current format, quite tellingly, has very little to say about South Africa.

Vegans in the Interregnum: The Cultural Moment of an Enmeshed Theory

In this essay, Wright traces her historical and personal understanding of vegan studies as it emerged—unnamed—somewhere around 2003, when she was working on a doctoral dissertation on the works of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. She then furthers the trajectory of vegan theory as a mode of politically engaged scholarly inquiry via a theoretical inquiry into the often-overt focus on veganism, tacit fear of politicized eating, and animal bodies that played a role in the 2016 US presidential election of Donald J. Trump.

A History of South African Literature (review)

Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar is a beautifully puttogether book. It contains numerous high quality, and often full-page, images of the textiles discussed in the papers, many of them the actual pieces that Linton collected. Also found here, in the three ethnographic chapters especially, are images of the many different methods for producing textiles and the many different ways in which these textiles are put to use. In all cases, image captions are clear and informative. Although aimed at a general audience, individual papers collected in this volume will doubtless prove interesting to specialists in the manufacture and social significance of textiles, and to students of Malagasy ethnography and history. Andrew Walsh University of Western Ontario London, Ontario